


there’s a human word for this

by IneffableDoll



Series: Ineffable Confessions of Love [18]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Asexual Aziraphale (Good Omens), Asexual Crowley (Good Omens), Asexuality, Aziraphale Loves Crowley (Good Omens), Character Study, Crowley Loves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Developing Relationship, Fluff, Friendship, Holding Hands, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Introspection, Light Angst, Love Confessions, M/M, POV Crowley (Good Omens), POV First Person, Queerplatonic Relationships, Romance, Romantic Friendship, Slow Burn, Stream of Consciousness, inner monologues for daaaaaaaaaays, it's the one no one uses on this site again, this is very difficult to describe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:13:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25958074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IneffableDoll/pseuds/IneffableDoll
Summary: “I am finally going to do it. I am going to tell him, and everything is going to be just fine.”There are a lot of ways to love. This is one of them.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Ineffable Confessions of Love [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1714558
Comments: 18
Kudos: 64
Collections: Aspec-friendly Good Omens





	there’s a human word for this

**Author's Note:**

> My second go at a first-person Crowley POV. I get very introspective when I go first person, but this is kinda absurd. It really was going to be about 2K, I SWEAR.  
> This is pretty slow, but it is generally comfy and hopefully interesting. I hope it makes you think and ask questions. That’s what Crowley would want; don’t you think? Maybe we owe it to ourselves to ask questions, even when we think we have answers.

_I am finally going to do it. I am going to tell him, and everything is going to be just fine._

This is what I repeated to myself as I wove my way through the London traffic, foot pressed unyielding against the pedal until it nearly hit the floor. Driving fast had always served to calm me. It made me feel untethered and light – free, even. I liked to think I could just keep driving forever and no one and nothing could ever catch me or stop me.

It was a useful daydream, after spending the entirety of Earth’s existence and the full memory’s span of my own in the servitude of Hell.

As crazy as it sounds, it wasn’t so bad, right at first. My memories of Heaven were fuzzy at best, but even the sharpest ones were bright and had a lot of mandatory time spent chanting in choirs and memorizing rulebooks. I couldn’t be bothered with either, really.

In Hell, there was more freedom. Rather, there was the veil of it, right at the beginning, before everyone came to understand their place. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy however you spin it, and Hell modeled itself after the best. Before I knew it, choirs were replaced with mind-numbing chants of loyalty, and rulebooks with…well, just more rulebooks, but slightly charred versions that I liked to doodle in when I was bored. Which was most of the time.

But now, I had no need for launching myself into this imagined world where Hell would not touch me, because that was exactly where I was.

Sure, it probably wouldn’t last forever. I wasn’t quite stupid enough to believe that. No doubt, our – that is, Aziraphale’s and my – respective head offices would be back on their BS in due time. But, for now, Hell thought I was immune to holy water, was capable of killing Ligur, and all-around an invincible menace and embarrassment. I really wouldn’t have had it any other way, and I fully intended to savor it.

It was with this in mind that I firmly pressed against the brakes, swerving into what was definitely not a parking spot, and stalked into a quaint café to pick up a smattering of pastries, danishes, and cakes. These joined the two first editions that sat in a box in the backseat.

In a brave new world where anything was possible, I dared to let myself wonder what I could do with that freedom. And everything I came up with – scaling pyramids and planting a tree on the moon and collecting James Bond Blu-Rays – all, in my mind’s eye, had Aziraphale at my side for it. Possibly dangling on my arm, or me on his, or something. The specifics weren’t important, and we don’t need to get heteronormative about it, anyway.

But the thing was that…Aziraphale and I weren’t really like that in a tangible way. Whatever we felt, whatever I knew he felt for me, it was something quiet and not to be discussed. Not out loud.

Maybe I should’ve felt a little more embarrassed about it, but I’d become numb to the fact that I loved him ages and ages and ages ago. Not numb to the love part, no, but numb to its existence in me. It just became a facet of who I was at one point or another. I’m Crowley. I tempted the first woman, I didn’t start the Spanish Inquisition, and I love Aziraphale.

Just one of the things that was true, but I never, ever spoke about. Aziraphale did the same.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about fear. Fear _burns_. It feels like a literal fire, a lick of flame that sits in your chest. It’s like this stupid little tea candle, totally harmless, but when you least expect it, it engulfs you in an inferno, and nothing at all can stop it. It becomes such a real presence that you start to fear being afraid, maybe even more than whatever sparked you to begin with.

There is nothing quite like the constant fear that your mere presence beside the one you love could get them killed. My fear hadn’t been a tea candle for as long as I knew.

All of this is to say that there were three factors at play here, and none of them were blonde, blue-eyed Antichrists. One was freedom, long unattainable, and now a truth we had to settle into tentatively, with all the precaution warranted of two lifetimes that begot no taste of it. One was fear, as constant as freedom was not, now not entirely banished and still lurking, but no longer as present as it once was, and even then, it lingered for different things and different reasons.

And one was Aziraphale.

This was why I was parking in Soho. I swooped the boxes from my backseat into my arms and approached the bookshop, which was closed, and didn’t knock, because I never had before and was not one for starting new habits when I didn’t have to.

Once again, with feeling.

_I am finally going to do it. I am going to tell him, and everything is going to be just fine._

I strode in with a swagger that was a third intentional, a third habit, and a third the result of my spinal issues – not quite scoliosis since it didn’t hurt, but I had a very flexible, curved spine.

I liked to think I was not nice, and that was mostly true, since I hadn’t exactly had the freedom to express it. But, ever since our – well, we called it a retirement to be cheeky, but it was just as accurate to say we quit as to say we were fired. So, retirement. Anyway, I only had the option to be nice in the past year or so without repercussion, and let’s just say that if Aziraphale hadn’t known I cared for him somehow, he most certainly did after all the dinners and gifts and other such sundry.

To be totally fair, it wasn’t just me. Aziraphale struggled with it – his fear always burned a little hotter than mine, after all – but I could tell he was making an effort to…catch up to me, or something, in the existence of us as a pair, a duo, a set. He called me nearly as often as I called him. He started visiting my flat on occasion, though he nagged me the whole time about how dreary it was. He even fulfilled that old promise from the ‘60s about taking me on a picnic a half dozen times. Picnics had never been my thing – the invention of tables was a delight, lemme tell ya – but I was not about to complain about it.

So, yes, we were taking it slow. It was comfortable, and a Heaven of an improvement over the whole we-can’t-even-say-we’re-friends-because-that-might-get-us-killed thingy that’d been clinging to our coattails since the literal dawn of time.

It was always easier for me to shake, or ignore – my body was shaped by rebellion, so it was in my blood in a literal sense – but Aziraphale felt differently. He was more cautious, more careful in his decisions…so long as flaming swords weren’t involved, I guess. He liked to evaluate every possible outcome, and to inspect his every emotion and thought, before committing himself. It took me nearly five centuries to get him to acquiesce to the Arrangement, after all, and that was after over four millennia of knowing each other.

The Arrangement was no more, ever since Adam Young did his thing and reset the world to its previous state, but with a few more adventure books in Aziraphale’s collection.

I was always afraid of asking for too much, for _being_ too much, even when I felt that sometimes, too much was asked of _me._ But with Aziraphale, where there had long been dread and fear, there was a slowly morphing sense of security and rightness that I could not define, and hardly felt I deserved.

But I was a demon, and that maybe warranted a bit of selfishness, so I clutched to that feeling for all I was worth with no intent to ever let go.

“Angel!” I called out as I walked into the bookshop, though it was largely unnecessary. Aziraphale knew there was only one person who could get in when the door was locked, and I knew there were only four sitting spaces in the whole bookshop where he might be, and he only used two. Nonetheless, I called out my not-so-subtle term of endearment and tried not to beam in anticipation. I’d only seen him just yesterday, for Hell’s sake.

“In the back, dear!” Aziraphale called. Obviously, he was in the back, if I didn’t see him at the counter. I readjusted my load and continued ambling through to where I knew I’d find my angel, probably perched over some manuscript.

Sure enough, Aziraphale was at his desk. Judging by the little spectacles I tried very hard not to find adorable and the smell of leather glue, he was in the middle of a book repair, which he always insisted on doing entirely the human way – unless it was impossible without a little miraculous nudge. He might not be able to drop what he was doing right away if that was the case, but that was okay.

“Oh, goodness!” Aziraphale exclaimed when he saw the two boxes I was carrying. “Look at all this.”

He looked so excited every time I brought him something, like it still surprised him after all these years that this was simply the way I loved him, or perhaps that I _continued_ to do so. I understood. Heaven and abandonment issues weren’t exactly foreign to me. “Brought you a couple things,” I said pointlessly, placing them on one of the tables that actually managed to be clear of books.

“Give me a moment, Crowley,” Aziraphale said eagerly. “I need to finish this bit. I’ll be just a tic.”

“’Course,” I replied, not even teasing him about it. He loved repairing books and, alright, maybe it was weirdly attractive to me to see him all focused like that on this delicate, underappreciated craft. I may not have been a book person, but the way Aziraphale loved books always inspired me in a weird way.

While Aziraphale finished up, I wandered in the bookshop a bit. I knew it better than anyone but the angel himself, but it still struck me sometimes, the sheer volume of tomes that cluttered his space. There were as many books as there were pine needles on forest floors, in every variety of color and shape and age, some as ancient as writing itself and some practically as fresh as the pastries I bought for him – and all were well-loved.

Not a single page would dare be dog-eared in his presence, but few were truly pristine. Pristine books aren’t cherished.

My mind wandered as I breathed in enough dust to give a human at least three diseases, the tang of binding glue subtle in the grove of leather, fabric, and parchment, with the slightest hint of vanilla lingering. It was a storage of not just books or knowledge, but of sensations, of memories, of – in many ways – us.

We were stored in these pages, and not only literally in his misprinted bibles, but also in the books I got for him. In the books we discussed. In the books he ranted about to me while I tried to keep up with the rapid-fire storyline he failed to retell chronologically. This bookshop always had a way of making room for me.

Just like Aziraphale did.

Though I knew I’d loved Aziraphale for so, incredibly long, I’d never been clear on the form it took. The types of loves in the stories he so adored, that I passed by as I took slow steps past the overflowing shelves that I’d seen a thousand times before.

There was friendship, obviously. He was my best friend and we were finally at a place where we didn’t have to deny it – not that I really made a habit of doing so, but still.

There was familial love, in addition to that. A protectiveness, a mutual desire to guard and keep. Aziraphale was definitely the closest thing I had to the human concept of family. There was the idea of the chosen family – blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb and all, if you'll let me slip in a verse – and that sometimes felt very much like what Aziraphale and I had.

Then, there was the question of romantic love. Romantic and sexual relations were so often intertwined that it took me a long time to separate them in my head, both being such incredibly human things, after all. I had no sexual desires, only curiosities, because I’m me and I always had questions and enough grit to ask them.

But romantic love was something different, something separated from lust, something that was friendship and family but with a little bit of something else to it. Not inherently more than friendship, from what I could parse, more equal to it when both were done well.

What really made friendship and romance different? Commitment, covetousness? I had no pool of friends to compare like humans typically did. I just had Aziraphale. Humans cropped up, many wormed their way in deep and never really left me completely, but he was the only person in the universe with whom I could truly have a lasting bond.

We were it for each other.

Would such a thing indicate an inherent romantic subtext? Of course not, but it absolutely could, too. What would it mean, for us to be romantically involved? Typically, to be exclusive, which is a guarantee just based on our – species, I suppose, though still worth discussing. We could introduce a physical element, a non-sexual intimacy, but couldn’t friendships also have such things? What made one type one thing, and something else another? As supernatural entities, could we ever hope to define it? Is it about the involvement of tongues, is that it?

_Does it matter?_

The more I thought about it, the more difficult it was to place what exactly I felt for Aziraphale, and how I wanted us to be together. I indulged in the romantic clichés I knew of and found that some suited us, and some didn’t. I didn’t know if that was an answer or not, but I was honestly not that used to getting answers, so I might not have seen it.

Regardless, our relationship, whatever form it took, didn’t need to be defined in mortal language or even words, then. We were just…whatever we needed to be, until we were whatever we wanted to be. And that was enough. More than.

All I could say definitively, now that the world had changed by staying the same, was that I reveled in the barren honesty between us since we found our freedoms. And if I truly valued honesty so much, then I wanted to be able to use the words to be honest about this, too.

Big breath in, exhale.

_I am going to tell him, and everything is going to be just fine._

I did believe that, to some extent, but habits don’t evaporate overnight, or in a few months, or in a year. For either of us.

My reverie was snapped away by Aziraphale clearing his throat behind me. I turned to see he’d been watching me for who knows how long, trailing my long fingers along the bindings of his texts on languages, many long dead and forgotten by all but two.

He gave me a soft smile. His look was so knowing, I almost wondered if he could somehow tell what I’d been thinking about, and what I planned to talk about today. But I quickly abolished the thought, because if he did, I didn’t think I’d be able to work up the courage to actually say it.

“All finished?” I asked, brushing dust off my hands a bit overdramatically, causing a fake plume to stir as I smirked at him. “I’ve just been dusting; hopefully I’ll be done in a millennium or two.”

Aziraphale rolled his eyes indulgently at my antics, trying and failing to pretend he wasn’t at least a little amused. “How very kind of you to clean for me, my dear. I’m ever so grateful,” he replied with twinkling eyes and a smug grin.

“You watch your mouth!” I said with mock offense. Stepping forward, I accidentally inhaled the dust I’d stirred up and starting coughing – very dramatically, if I do say so myself.

“Oh, stop that,” Aziraphale intoned, knowing full well I didn’t need to cough, let alone breathe. “You’ve got your little boxes tempting me by my desk and I’d like very much to see what’s in them.”

I thought about making some sort of tease about “tempting” before deciding against it. We shimmied through the narrow shelves and past overflowing tiered tables back to his desk, and I presented him with my little gifts.

In typical Aziraphale manner, he exclaimed with delight at the treats and insisted on trying one that instant, as though I hadn’t been bringing him these since Aziraphale made an off-hand comment about their blueberry filling a decade ago. Afterward, I presented him with the books with a wink and flourish, because obviously, and he gave me an extremely gooey look that made me glad for my sunglasses.

I started wearing sunglasses about two millennia back, switching up style and make as trends developed. Before that, it’d been a nightmare to try and hide my pupils from humans, endlessly superstitious. I was anything from a wicked spirit to a revered God, depending on the who and where and when. It got tiring fast, to wonder if the populace I approached would greet me with a stoning or piles of gold.

Not that I minded the latter, mind you.

At some point – and I really couldn’t tell you when – they became more than just a way of hiding my snake eyes from humans. More than just a way to avoid the accusations and troubles they came with. And, to be clear, it’s not because I didn’t like them – I always felt they were really cool and a neat color. But I felt safer with them covered, like no one could read me or see what I thought.

I wondered when Aziraphale had become someone I needed to hide from; why I still felt a need to now.

On the heels of this thought was the realization that he could read me, regardless, like one of his many books. Was it the eyebrows?

Regardless of potential insecurities, internal emotional suppression, yadda yadda, I took my sunglasses off in that moment and tucked them in my jacket pocket in a swift, nonchalant movement, as though it didn’t matter and wasn’t important.

I didn’t want to hide myself from Aziraphale anymore; that was the entire point.

I’d be a fool not to see the way Aziraphale held my gaze, the quirk on the sides of his mouth in obvious delight, but he was kind enough not to say anything.

Gifts in the afternoon turned to tea. Some days, we’d go out and eat somewhere, but today we ordered something to be delivered from this Italian place I’d taken a liking to lately. Food was really give-and-take for me, so Aziraphale tended to get excited when we found a restaurant I enjoyed. What can I say, they had sublime ravioli.

I’d been spending a lot of time at the bookshop lately, so this was fairly routine. It was like a home-away-from-home, except that my flat was never really my home. Demons don’t get to have homes. They have…lairs, domains, locales. My flat was the product of a space designed to be what Hell wanted to see from me: cold, impersonal, dark. The plants were my exception, though they probably radiated enough sheer terror to make up for that – and they’d keep it up if they knew what was good for them.

But here, I felt all my inhibitions and barriers slip away like they’d never been there at all.

 _What is a home, to a demon?_ I’d spent my time on Earth in many houses and buildings and spaces, but even they never felt like they belonged to me. No matter where I was, Hell could appear, Hell could be watching. The bookshop should have been so much worse, with the threat that Heaven’s agents could walk in at any given moment. It was not a safe space, only a static one, a fixture of a city I’d begrudgingly grown to love.

But then I saw it burn, and saw it come back. And sometimes, I just needed to remember that it was still here and that none of that had happened but in the minds of a select few witnesses.

And that was when I realized that the bookshop was not a home to me, either. Maybe home didn’t have to be a _place,_ at all.

As we finished our food and Aziraphale suggested breaking out the wine, I felt time slipping away, each minute another one closer to what I planned – hoped – to do that day. Every minute, another one I let pass without just…starting the conversation I knew we needed to hold.

I wasn’t anxious in the same way Aziraphale was. I didn’t twist my hands or stammer over syllables – though I did tend to babble a bit. Mostly, I just shoved it down so deep I choked on it, then let it overwhelm me the moment I was certain I was completely alone.

I could feel it creeping up on me, threatening to have me sprinting out the door any moment with some half-formed excuse.

Perhaps Aziraphale noticed my discomfort somehow, for, halfway through pouring the wine – I didn’t pay attention to what kind it was – he glanced up at me with a slightly concerned air and said just a little bit too casually, “Is anything bothering you, Crowley?”

I pressed my lips together. Considered lying. Realized this was my in, and thought about the Robert Frost poem everyone knows.

“Well, not bothering, exactly,” I said carefully, “but I did, uh, have something I wanted to…bring up.” I chose each word with precision, trying not to be too cryptic as to confuse, nor too blatant as to give myself away, right out of the gate.

Aziraphale raised his eyebrows in genuine interest. That was something I loved about Aziraphale, was how he was always interested in what I had to say, even if it was something that he had absolutely no idea about. He let me rant about my M25 project for months, then red-eye, then emojis, then iPod charging cords, then pop-up ads, and then literally every aspect of printers.

Point was, he cared, just out of virtue of it being _me_ who was talking. He was a bigger supporter of my low-grade evil than Hell was, even if he scolded me for it all with sparkling eyes.

“Alright,” Aziraphale said calmly, making a “go on” gesture with his free hand as he plunked the bottle carefully down onto the low table.

“So, the thing is,” I started as I accepted the glass, our fingers barely brushing, “ever since we got our freedom from Hell and Heaven, we’ve been exploring what exactly we like doing with that. And that’s been really fun, yeah?”

Aziraphale nodded, though it was mostly a rhetorical question. “It’s taken a good deal of adjusting, but I do rather figure we’re doing well for ourselves,” he replied with an air of satisfaction. “Though I would still like to do that ‘round-the-world trip as we’ve been discussing.”

“For sure,” I agreed. “Hit all the places we haven’t been to in ages or ones we never got to. I haven’t been to Seoul in eons.”

“Oh, and Kyoto.”

“Rome, probably. For the memories.”

“Mmm, yes. And perhaps Mumbai?”

“Sure. Shanghái, Cairo, Buenos Aires, Rio, Nice, the Maldives, Vienna…”

“Consta- er, Istanbul!”

I snorted at his slip. “Yes, Istanbul.”

He ignored my mock. “Oh, and definitely Paris,” he said a bit dreamily. “Do you know, I haven’t been back since the Revolution?”

I did know. How could I forget that particular occasion? French royals and noble-folk getting beheaded left and right, and my little English aristocrat of an angel thought this was the appropriate setting and occasion for some French cuisine.

He never even l _earned_ French, for Someone’s sake.

I barely bit back my laugh at the memory and shook my head in amusement. “I still can’t believe-“

“Oh, hush,” Aziraphale cut in with pursed lips. “We have the one-century rule for a reason. You’ve had your fun.” The one-century rule was something Aziraphale established very shortly after the Arrangement itself. It dictated that we wouldn’t tease the other for something that happened more than a century ago, but that first hundred years was fair game.

The unspoken secondary rule of the one-century rule was that we both staunchly ignored it if we were the one teasing, but had a sudden clarity of memory if we were the one who did something embarrassing that we’d rather have forgotten.

“Alright, alright,” I acquiesced with a wave of the hand, sipping my wine to hide my growing smile.

“Anyway, I do believe I distracted us a touch,” Aziraphale said sheepishly. “You were saying something, before?”

I’d actually forgotten about that in trying to think of cities I wanted to see and our usual, comfortable banter. I tensed before forcibly relaxing my muscles. I did sit up a little straighter, though.

“Right, yeah. So, freedoms, exploring stuff. Traveling the world.” I cleared my throat pointlessly. “And, um, we’ve also not had to sneak about and hide in order to see each other, which has been so much easier than all our clandestine meetings before.”

“To be fair, the Ritz was never clandestine, even before the Appo-“

I waved my free hand again, brushing his comment away before he could even finish. I didn’t want us to get side-tracked again by arguing the finer points of secret agent etiquette. “Yes, but it’s different now.”

He gave me one of his soft smiles. “You’re right. It is.”

I blinked, frozen a moment at his relaxed and indulgent expression, before reminding myself to move on before we stared at each other for too long. “Erm. So, I had a thought that, as we are now no longer tied to any particular expectations, as it were, then we don’t really have to, you know, answer to what anyone says we should do, or say, or – or _be.”_

I stood to pace, wine forgotten on the side table. I felt a little desperate and very linguistically inept as I grasped for the right words. Aziraphale had a way of interpreting the drivel I spouted when I was ranting, and making sense of it in succinct ways I couldn’t have constructed if I’d bothered to actually consider how I was going about this beforehand. So, hopefully, it’d be fine, but I still wanted to aim for intelligibility and purpose.

“My point is,” I said, emphasizing with my pointer finger, “that since we don’t have anything we are required to do, nor any specific rules to follow besides the ones we set for ourselves, and choose to follow regarding the limitations of living among humans, that we…” I faltered, staring at the ceiling. “We can do anything, now,” I finished a little lamely.

I dared to make eye contact with Aziraphale, who’d sat primly at attention in his armchair for the duration of my unimpressive monologue.

Aziraphale’s expression was difficult to parse. There was something deeply contemplative in the way his mouth was set, but also, there shone that tucked-away excitement that he’d so long had to smother in the crinkles around his eyes. The tense line of his jaw against soft folds was both the soldier of his making and the thinker of his choosing.

Put simply, I had no clue how he was really reacting, inside.

“Further,” I found myself nervously adding, almost without permission, “that means that there are things we have been doing, and not doing, because we’re still living according to them, and what they expected of us. But. We don’t have to. This future, this planet, this – whoever we are, is what we make of it. Our choosing.”

My arms fell to my side from where they’d been frantically waving as I spoke, my whole body stilling as I prepared for a response.

After a moment’s consideration, Aziraphale finally turned his gaze from the middle distance to my sunglass-less face. “It is true that we have those freedoms,” he said carefully, “but a life without any rules would be a chaotic one. As you imply, we have something approaching Free Will, but even humans found that there can be too much of a good thing…” He faltered, glancing away, no doubt remembering our very first conversation and realizing as he spoke that he was basically admitting I had been right. At least, in one way.

 _Wouldn’t it be funny, if I did the good thing and you did the bad one?_ A question so harmless, it became perhaps the most dangerous one I’d asked since I Fell.

“A-Anyway,” Aziraphale continued when I didn’t comment, “There needs to be a semblance of some form of order, one that we can agree upon. Where boundaries and lines are drawn, so as to avoid confusion among ourselves, and the humans, and each other.”

I nodded, finally relieved. “Yes, exactly that.”

“And the best way for one to go about establishing precedents of behavior and expectation is to discuss such,” he added.

I nodded again, like a bobblehead. “Yeah.”

Aziraphale relaxed into his chair a bit, tight expression clearing as he regarded me. “So, I can’t help but get the impression that you’re bringing this up for a reason,” he noted, almost business-like. “Is there a specific element of our freedom that you wish to bar, or to suggest?”

I swallowed. This was what I had been trying to build up to. A day of gifts and easy conversation and a shared meal, which I of course did do normally, but today was approached with a purpose. A conversation I started and abetted because I had something I wanted to say, but I needed to be certain Aziraphale was as clear as possible on why I was saying it before I could get there.

If I could only find the words.

“There’s something I want to do,” I admitted, sinking back down onto the sofa, still perched on the edge, precarious as my words. “Something that involves you, something I am free to do by technicalities and…overarching, universal bylaws.”

Aziraphale looked both exasperated and fond. “Tell me, Crowley. What is it?”

I gnawed at my lower lip, eyes darting about before settling on Aziraphale’s left hand, which was curled over his knee comfortably, his tiny golden ring on his pinky. “Before everything, I was never able to say some of the things I think about because of the danger those thoughts presented. To me, and to you. It’s a – well, it’s a really hard habit to break out of.” Almost as hard as it was to form, to be honest. “But I’d like to, if it’s – if you’re – if that’s okay. With you.”

Aziraphale made an encouraging sound. I glanced at his face, which looked curious and, dare I say, eager, though he was very, very still. “Go on, then,” he murmured.

“I…” I gulped, then took in and exhaled a deep breath, hoping to steady my nerves with such a human trick. I couldn’t make eye contact when I spoke and stared at his hand again for all I was worth. “I want to be able to tell you that I – that I, you know, love you, or whatever. Now that – that I can.” I took another deep breath, let it go. “But I don’t know if that’s something you’re okay with.”

The very room seemed to hold its breath, which sounds dumb, but that’s the way it felt to me. If it’d been packed full of people, it would’ve been just as quiet, and just as loud in its deafening tension. I sat there, completely frozen, ogling one of Aziraphale’s hands, my own curled into fists in my lap. I realized with a smidge of embarrassment that my shoulders were hunched up to my ears, like a child trying to appear small and inoffensive, and quickly amended my slouch.

It was an exposed silence. It was putting my heart in Aziraphale’s hands, as I had so often done to unfortunate effect. He seemed to take a moment to pause and simply acknowledge my vulnerability, and the power he now held, whether he wanted it or not.

In that handful of seconds, I felt my resolve wither, just a moment too late to matter. For all my swaggering and smirking and general coolness, I couldn’t help but think about the fact that I was sometimes so much more fragile than I let anyone see.

I hated the weakness. I hated being weak, being easily shattered.

But I was not like Aziraphale. I could not keep my back straight and take what was thrown at me in silence. To turn the other cheek, to remain a pillar of strength in the face of everything that wanted to break me. I was not a figure scratched with the scuff marks of a steadfast faith.

No, when I fell, I Fell hard.

I could liken myself to a million different similes. Think me glass, so simple to splinter. Think me paint, pointlessly staining. Think me a feather, slack in the wind and torn by each branch that snagged me.

Even with this, I was still someone who approached the edge of the cliff and jumped, time and time again. Not because I was unafraid, or because I was stupid, or failed to grasp the concept of consequences – but because the torment of silence and small talk and lies, of never knowing or understanding, had always been so much worse than the potential for being rendered apart for my curiosity. I had no respect for anything that could not abide by my reckless want for answers.

So, perhaps I could be fragile. But I also knew I could tape myself back together from two threads, glue myself from chunks of slivers, sew myself from shreds and patches. I had done it before.

And I knew that Aziraphale saw all of this, had always seen this in me, and he probably thought about that Robert Frost poem, too.

His hand clenched. _Bravery._ The bravery to say something you know will hurt, or the bravery to say something that has long been lodged in your chest?

I let myself face him, and he looked at me. We took each other in, in the silence, in the heat of tension, as we stepped on the balls of our feet across a ledge and swayed dangerously in wind. Teetering, to one side or the other, unsure. He wore his every doubt, his every worry, his every fear and wonder and hope on his face.

But above all, I saw that he was smiling.

“My dear,” he said softly, as though his tone could ever make his words less loud to my desperate senses, “making use of such a freedom is…is exactly what I hope we can do now. I wish to do the same. To tell you every day, in fact, that I love you, if something so sentimental is a habit you can tolerate.”

I swear to Satan…he followed this up with a _wink._

I swallowed. “Cheeky,” I replied in a scratchy, strangled voice I did not recognize. I returned his smile in my own wobbly way, feeling alive.

It was the first time we’d tried to put the incomprehensible mass of our feelings into words. They weren’t even close to enough, even if we said them again in every language at our disposal. Our love, our – whatever one may call it, went beyond the concepts that humans used to understand it.

But, at the same time, it was human itself. In some ways, we had them to thank for it at all. Would we, and could we, have ever let ourselves feel this way without their influence, without their – yes – _love?_ Practicalities of proximity aside, humanity was an irrevocably intertwined component of what we were, what we had become, and who we would be.

Together. Us two, with our humans.

It was only right that we used a human word to describe it.

“I love you,” I repeated, tasting the words, out loud. Words I’d whispered to empty rooms, to pinpricked skies, mouthed into the night. _I love him. I love her. I love them._ Whatever Aziraphale was, I loved.

“I love you, too,” Aziraphale replied, shifting in his seat with an ecstatic grin. He looked like all the clichés – a kid in a candy store, the cat who got the cream, a fox in a henhouse. Aziraphale was someone who should have always been allowed to wear his joy on his sleeve, but millennia of regimented suppression made it a battle not to hold back his smiles, his happiness. He had been taught that his joy was wrong and that he should never express it by Upstairs. He was belittled for the delight he found in the simplicities of humanity. It would take time and effort to feel relinquished completely.

So, seeing his smile now, unfettered, his shoulders relaxed, was truly the most beautiful sight I’d ever beheld.

“Do you – I mean,” I said, still smiling myself. “There are a lot of ways to, and now that we, ya know, can, I thought maybe we could try some, I don’t know, some new things? Talk about them?”

Aziraphale seemed to melt at my incoherent babbling, apparently finding something endearing about not being able to knit a single articulate sentence. “There are lots of human customs that we could try.”

“I don’t want to do them just because they’re customs,” I clarified. “No expectations, okay?”

His face softened further, if such was possible. “There are a number of customs I’ve enjoyed in the past,” he admitted, looking a bit pensive as he sorted through centuries of memories. “Things we did because they were the usual friendly touches of the era. Things friends could do. Linking arms, sitting in laps, depending on where we were, and when we were there, and even the genders we took on.”

“The humans have constantly…shifting views of what those sorts of things mean,” I said, gesturing vaguely. “It wasn’t even that long ago that we were doing stuff without any of the, well, romantic insinuations that they have now. Only a handful of centuries.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said easily. He folded his hands in his lap, studying his own thumbs thoughtfully, before looking back at me.

I’d sunk back into the sofa cushions a bit now that I’d gotten the words out and felt myself relaxing. Whatever came next, I already felt a strange sort of peace about. I knew that we were on the same page, when, for so long, I wasn’t even sure we were in the same book. Really, the talking was what I had wanted from us the most. So, the ball was in Aziraphale’s court, so to speak, if he wanted us to change in an additional way.

“If we were to do those things now, like holding hands and kissing – things we’ve done that have been platonic in previous cultures – would it feel different?” he asked, earnest and genuine. “Even though the physical act is the same, would the human conception of them, and their association with different types of relations, change the way we are able to experience them?”

“I think it would,” I admitted quietly. “We may not be human, but we do tend to change with them, and adapt with them.” Giving him a significant up-and-down, I added with a slight smirk, “Even if not all present parties necessarily want to.”

Aziraphale sniffed haughtily, though I could tell it was for show. “We’re having a serious discussion, Crowley! Now is not the time for poking fun at my tailor’s perfectly respectable craftsmanship!”

I laughed. “Right, right, don’t get your knickers in a twist.”

Aziraphale rolled his eyes. I was starting to suspect he may never stop smiling. “So, then I suppose the question is…” he hesitated, seeming to take a moment of courage for himself, “if we choose to abide by the way humans have changed their views of different forms of physical contact, then what…boundaries are we to set?” He studied me, my practically untouched wineglass, a random spot on the wall. “Do you… _want_ to hold hands and other things?”

It struck me in that moment how very stupid we were.

There we were, trying to have this significant, academic conversation, discussing human social mores, comparing our supernatural knowledge accumulation of physical experience in terms of customs, talking ourselves into circles of analysis, discussing and evaluating like professors or historians…when we were both just very old, very daft teenagers trying to hold hands with their crush.

By Someone, there should’ve been a guidebook for this.

“Angel,” I said slowly, blinking under the weight of my epiphany, “come sit next to me.”

He didn’t even seem surprised by this sudden demand, just pleased. He plucked up his wine glass and crossed the short remainder of the room. Placing his wine by mine, he sat opposite me, a bit how we did on public benches. Neither totally at the ends, neither totally in the middle. Nearly meeting halfway.

I couldn’t help but become overwhelmed by my sense of de ja vu as I shifted my shoulders and held out my hand with a nonchalance I did not feel. I had done this before, for a practical purpose, and we had let go too quickly, then. The flash of a palm in mine, the wrong skin, the straining curves of flesh over bones and muscle and tendons.

 _Is it human, to be tactile? Are humans the only ones allowed to want?_ Well, no. Cats and dogs, lizards and birds, the entire animal kingdom tended to negate that. Most of the pets that humans took on sought physical contact, and while snakes, for example, didn’t necessarily love being touched, it varied, and allowing themselves to be handled was a sign of trust and affection.

The need and want for touch were not limited. It seemed to simply be a trait of the living. And whatever we were, whether our hearts beat or our lungs expanded, we were alive.

There could be no shame in wanting something that maybe, just maybe, They wanted us to feel. Not that I cared what They wanted me to be doing, but I was also aware that, whatever humans had made of their planet, They laid out the blueprints first. The humans took those blueprints and cut them up into shapes, scribbled on them with Sharpies, folded it into origami, wrote notes and rhymes in the margins. They all shared pieces of it – perhaps the only time humanity had every truly shared something – and made it into something else.

And maybe that was what They intended, too. We had no way of knowing. We could spend all day speculating – and this is, after all, what we and the humans had been doing for millennia, anyway.

The problem with Heaven and Hell was that they didn’t ask, they just assumed they were in the right. Assumed their interpretation could be the only correct way to see it.

But I learned how to ask questions.

So did Aziraphale. Really, he didn’t need to be taught to question, only to speak.

And when the End of the World had come and gone, we held hands for a brief flash, for the first time since it was the social custom between friends. It had turned into something different. But we were not indebted to the views of humans, not forced to love by the rules they set.

We chose the humans, not because they were perfect, but because we were not, either.

Aziraphale took my hand.

“Oh,” I breathed softly, involuntarily. What was it about interlocking fingers that felt so intimate? We tested the hold, shifting, adjusting to this new and old sensation. I wondered if my hands had always been so sensitive.

“You’re right,” Aziraphale said softly, after a moment. “It does feel different.”

I nodded. “It’s supposed to mean more now,” I said. “Friends do this sometimes…do you remember romantic friendships?”

Romantic friendships were something that only developed language for itself – in English, at least – in Victorian England, which is why it was most heavily associated with that era, despite really existing as long as people have formed bonds, in general. A romantic friendship was a close and personal relationship with some level of physical connection but without sexual intimacy. The modern term “queerplatonic” was an evolution, or perhaps simply a new facet, of the romantic friendship.

Not quite a traditional friendship, not quite a traditional romance, but instead, a liminal place wherein we could decide our own boundaries, set our own stage. Humans did this when societal expectations failed to align with the way they wished to interact with their loved ones. Perhaps, it was something like what we would do, because we lacked any expectations at all.

“I do recall,” Aziraphale replied thoughtfully. “Very popular in the literature of the 19th century.” He squeezed my hand. “We don’t need to define ourselves according to the humans, but perhaps…it’s a place to start. A way to categorize.”

“Exactly,” I said. “I know us. You like order and letting everything have its place in your mind. I have too many curiosities not to wonder about labels. And – and it’s not like we’re stuck with the words we choose,” I hastened to add. “We can change later. We can stay the same. _They’re_ going to change over time, anyway. We can adapt to how we feel, and – and what we choose to do.”

Aziraphale gave me a look, one so tender and gentle, his grasp was the only thing keeping me from doing something drastic and probably intensely unnecessary. “I love you, Crowley,” he whispered. “I love _us.”_

Even though I initiated this, I wasn’t prepared for it, and it took me a moment to respond in kind. “Love you, too,” I murmured, staring at Aziraphale’s hand again. Instead of studying its gentle curl over his knee, I now memorized the pads of his fingertips resting between each of my knuckles, the gentle rasp of his restless thumb, the thick weight of his wrist peeking from behind his cuffs, the warm but not uncomfortable press of his ring against my skin.

There would be time for changing. There would be time for stagnation. But this was simply a time to exist, to relish. It was something humans were big fans of. _Exist in the moment._ For immortal beings with so much time, we often lacked an appreciation for how precious each minute could be. A great abundance of something could become overwhelming or render us numb to it. The concept of eternity was too large to face on a regular basis, and humans didn’t have to in the same way we grappled with it.

 _Too much of a good thing. Time. Free Will. Love._ Balance was needed, but was there such a thing as too much balance? Didn’t the world need chaos sometimes? Were discord and mischief not the counterweight to compassion and selflessness? Or was that simply something we came up with, to cope with the pain jogging alongside the joys of being alive?

Some days, it was just too much.

But that day, I wasn’t thinking about this. I wasn’t pondering the mysteries of the nature of existence, the discordant echoes of theological queries in contrast to universal truths.

There was something to be said for doing it the human way – living, that is. But what was the human way? So many cultures, so many eras, so many rules that changed and shifted over eons and even decades. Was there such a thing as a human way of going about things, or was the very nature of Free Will something that negated the concept of a fixed state of being?

I didn’t know. So, I leaned back in the sofa, and I held his hand.

This was where I wanted to be. Tomorrow and all that came with it could wait. We simply chose to breathe. We chose the people we became with each other; we chose the contradiction of our natures; we chose the way we fit in all the places we shouldn’t. We chose because we could, and when we could, we chose each other.

Above all, I knew that the human word for this was love.


End file.
